10 Reasons Why Your Website Has a Huge Bounce Rate

Mar

There was a time when just having a website was a luxury for a business. Your business was on the internet, The thought was overwhelming as much for the business owner as for customers and clients. But, today the world is rapidly changing, businesses are going online at a humongous rate and websites have become an integral and an overriding part of the business.

Websites strive to garner more and more traffic and factors like user interface, user experience, user friendliness etc. are considered to build a website. Yet there are higher bounce rates, low click rates, lesser time spent, falling page views etc. on websites. There could be many reasons why customers leave your website and result in low customer engagement.

Here are the top 10 reasons that are making people leave your website.

1. Pop-ups- Pop-ups are a necessary evil: necessary if you want people to sign up and gather the required information and evil when they are terribly irritating for nothing relevant. Probably you shouldn’t get rid off the pop-ups completely but you can design them in such a way that they do not irritate the visitor and can be turned off easily like- a single press on the escape button, instead of a typical cross window closer on the right top.

2. Poor Content- Content is the king, and no one likes a poor king. Content can be poor in different contexts: irrelevance, poor grammar, poor research, inaccurate information, incomprehensible and unclear, font, font size and color etc. According to many estimates around 40% of the visitors who have a negative experience do not return to a website. Make sure your website content is up to the mark that you wish to cater.

3. Mobile Unfriendly- This decade has seen the evolution of smartphones, which overtook every technology on which their predecessors were based on. Smartphones brought internet browsing on mobile phones and today half of the traffic to websites comes from mobiles. If your website is not mobile friendly you would surely get a huge dent in your website traffic.

4. Too Many Ads- Just like pop-ups, ads on the website are also a necessary evil. You may have a website which is based on ad revenue model, and it would be a terrible decision to take down the ads. But, that does not mean, you should have ads all over your web pages. There is a direct correlation between user experience and ads; the more the ads the worse the user experience. For a better user experience limit the ads on your website and place them strategically rather than randomly.

5. A Huge Loading Time- Not always it is the speed of the internet that could be blamed for more loading time. Websites with more loading time dissuade and deter the visitors and eventually increases the exit rate. Surveys say a loading time of more than 4 seconds destroys the user experience completely and that is not just the bad news, according to one study, 47% people expect a website to load in 2 seconds. There you are, slashed by another 2 seconds.

6. Bad Design- Probably the most important factor of a website is the design. Just like the websites themselves have evolved, website design has also evolved and today with industries like E-Commerce, website designs have evolved to be user-centric rather than information-centric. A design includes all aspect right from aesthetics- colors, color combinations, font, font size to physical- navigation, broken links etc.

7. Bad or No CTAs– A call-to-action (CTA) is similar to copywriting. If you are not clear about the message, it is a waste of everything. CTAs were generic at one time, but have evolved to be one of the most powerful medium on a website. Worst case is not having a CTA at all, which according to a few surveys stand at 80% (for small business). The right CTA is nothing but a great persuader and it is only a persuader you need, that kicks in a visitor when a website is doing all the talking for you.

8. Not Having an Exit Intent Popup- There is a point where pop-ups actually are required and it is- when the visitor is about to close the window. This is known as an exit intent pop up. There are tools which track the movement of the visitor’s cursor movements, and they know when the cursor moves to the top right. Yes, just when the visitor is about to close the window, an offer pops up with a 10% discount. What do you think, how good is that?

9. Complicated Checkout- Especially for the marketplace websites, the checkout process has to be simple yet effective. Making a payment is something that is already intrigued by factors like safety and security, on top of that if it becomes complicated, you would surely lose the customer.

10. Compulsive Logins and Tedious Sign-up Process- Almost all big websites today have signup options, that help them and the customers in many ways. If you are planning to have a signup feature on your website, keep the process really simple. Do not ask for too many questions as the visitors do not like to share their details on a relatively unknown website. Also, compulsive logins should be avoided, the visitor would not like to log in every time he/she visits your website.

Hope you are now well prepared to go ahead with your planning to build a website for your business, as it would now be easier, after knowing what to avoid and what to incorporate to build a great website. Make a website with these points in mind and convert visitors who are leaving into customers.